This startup wants to make life easy for restaurants & suppliers
Founded by IIT Kanpur students in 2015, SupplyNote solves for the challenges of the rapidly expanding Indian Hotel, Restaurant and Cafe sector (HoReCa). “In the coming days, the growth of this sector is going to be tremendous because India has both a large population and a fast growing economy. We were supplying packaging material to this industry and it was natural for us to venture into this fully,” says Kushang, CEO and co-founder, SupplyNote.
The startup offers a full stack software platform which integrates with a food business from the point of procurement of the ingredients to the point of sale. The platform uses sales data of a restaurant, analyses the sale of different recipes, understands what will be the future sales and auto creates an order cart for the restaurant to buy ingredients. “This is traditionally done by procurement managers,” says Kushang. “We then help the restaurant execute this purchase, either with their existing supplier or with one of the suppliers on our marketplace,” he adds.
The company also provides an operational infrastructure for restaurants to do the purchase, which includes order fulfilment, through aggregated fleets. “We currently cover 40 plus cities on the fulfillment side,” says Kushang. While marketplace and fulfillment capabilities being the service component of the business and in its nascent stage, the startup has achieved profitability with its SaaS model which includes plug and play software for the restaurants. It has raised about Rs 22 crore so far and is on its way to raise $5 million which will go into expanding the service component.
“Currently we are doing revenues close to $2.5 million and are completely asset light. Logistics cost in India is generally high and scattered. We want to use our tech to make it a lot more affordable and monetise the same,” says Kushang. At the moment, the startup is focused on restaurants which includes cloud kitchens, chain of restaurants, stand alone restaurants and QSRs across Indian metros. The startup has also acquired POSify, a restaurant POS software, to cater to this segment. “Tech adoption is faster with restaurant brands, which operate as an organised enterprise and those have been our focus. 60% of our growth comes from the brands,” says Kushang. On the supplier side, the startup is focused on new brands which come up with food products and their respective retail distributors. “We avoid wholesalers as we are actually competing with them. Including them will clutter the platform,” says Kushang.
The startup has been sailing on the tailwinds from Covid-19 pandemic. “Pre Covid-19, we were operating with around 700 restaurants and about 400 distributors. In 18 months, this grew to 5000 restaurants and 3200 distributors,” says Kushang. With the cold supply chain being an indispensable part of the food industry, the startup faces challenges in addressing the same. “We are trying to understand the spread of cold supply chain consumption. Once we have enough understanding, we can create demand and address it,” says Kushang.
Source: https://www.financialexpress.com/industry/sme/supplynote-piloting-expansion-plans-of-food-businesses/2893620/